Sarah Palin's scintillating success in last week's vice presidential debate with Joe Biden has made her an enormous asset (again) to John McCain's bid for the presidency. Now McCain must decide how to maximize her role in the campaign. Anything short of bringing her front and center makes no sense.

McCain was thrilled by her debate performance. "The kind of excitement that she ignites, frankly, I have not seen before in American politics," he told talk radio host Mike Gallagher. Having gambled in choosing her as his running mate, he may be inclined to double down and give her equal billing in the campaign. He should.

But there are still Palin doubters inside his campaign. Their attitude is relief that Palin got through the debate unscathed. Now they fear that elevating her role would be risky. She'd be vulnerable to the media wolves.

This thinking-that Palin might embarrass McCain-is what prompted the dubious decision to keep her tightly tethered for nearly a month following her rousing acceptance speech at the Republican convention. She gave a few interviews with carefully selected TV anchors, did poorly, and quickly became a burden for McCain, a running mate who failed the do-no-harm test for veep picks.

Her handlers were part of the problem. They gave her index cards on the issues she'd be allowed to discuss, instructed her to stay on message when dealing with the media, told her to echo McCain's thoughts and say little more. When she choked in the television interviews,

In 1984, President Reagan's advisers were accused of having "brutalized" him in preparing him for his first (disastrous) debate with Walter Mondale. They coached him to stress details, hardly his forte. Palin, too, was initially prepped to be someone she isn't, a political robot without a mind of her own. In the television interviews, her confidence, charisma, and star quality-her strengths-vanished.

But in the days before last week's debate with Joe Biden, new advisers arrived and Palin was set free-and her campaign task changed. In the debate with Biden, she had to show she understood foreign and domestic policy, could effectively tag Barack Obama as a high tax liberal and national security weakling, was ready to defend McCain and herself as reformers committed to change, and could appeal to middle class voters. She achieved all these while overpowering Biden with her personality.

The best measure of her success in the debate was this: She's been a national political figure for only a few weeks but made no serious mistakes, while Biden, a senator since 1973, committed a string of gaffes. In talking about the Middle East, he made "seven errors in 60 seconds," according to columnist Charles Krauthammer.

If she'd made even one or two of his mistakes, the media and the political community would have begun calling for her ouster from the McCain ticket. Biden, of course, probably won't be held accountable. That he won the debate on points, on substance, is the media's default position.